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Sep 25, 2017 | 02:21

Computer says no - beauty not in the eye of the beholder

They say beauty is in the eye of the beholder but now a computer facial mapping technique is proving geometry also plays an important part and the ancient Greeks knew all about it, as Stuart McDill reports.

TRANSCRIPT +

Beauty is not just in the eye of the beholder - as a computer can now confirm.
An ancient mathematical formula called the Golden Ratio, or 1.618, has been applied to George Clooney's face - and guess what? He's handsome.
The study was the work of London-based plastic surgeon Julian De Silva
SOUNDBITE (English) DR JULIAN DE SILVA, PLASTIC SURGEON, SAYING:
"There's no doubt there is a degree of beauty in the eye of the beholder and depending on your culture, your ethnicity, there are different characteristics towards what someone can define as attractive but this gives us something that we can actually use in an objective way when looking at human faces and looking at levels of attractiveness and beauty."
De Silva's facial mapping technique reduces the difference between significant facial measurements to a ratio and compares them to Phi.
SOUNDBITE (English) DR JULIAN DE SILVA, PLASTIC SURGEON, SAYING:
"We can look at the width of your eyes in relation to the length of the eyes. We can look at the height of the nose in proportion to the width of the nose. Using those different characteristics we can look at different elements of the face and adding up those different elements of the face we can get an overall proportion."
The ratio was studied by Euclid 300 years BC - and used for centuries by classical artists and architects
But Dr De Silva's patients are unaware of the age of the theory used to make them look younger
SOUNDBITE (English) DR JULIAN DE SILVA, PLASTIC SURGEON, SAYING:
"We use it everyday in terms of evaluation of the face. What we've been able to do with this form of facial mapping is we can actually apply something that is relatively objective to something that is inherently subjective."
US film star Bradley Cooper was second in De Silva's top ten, with British actor Idris Elba in seventh place.

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